Florian is responsible for thousands of uses and typeface entries on Fonts In Use. He also regularly moderates submissions, researches historical information, engages in discussions, and recruits people to participate. The site would be far less active without him and I am continually grateful for his critical contribution.

This homage to Foxy Brown, the 1974 blaxploitation film, presumably uses Cabernet, an uncredited digital replica of Benguiat Caslon. The photomontage on the main poster is very impressive. Unfortunately, the type treatment is less so, with some major unevenness in the spacing (e.g. ‘ou’ tight, ‘ry’ loose). Still, there’s no doubt this campaign captures the historical reference and the intended mood; the story is about a tough-as-nails hitwoman working for an organized crime family.

Re:publica is an annual conference that deals with web-related topics like blogging, social media, digital society, and web politics. On the occasion of re:publica 13 which opened it doors in Berlin today, Wortfeld has published a series of historic conference posters, claiming that they were discovered “in the attic of the state archives in Berlin-Dahlem”. The posters purportedly prove that the roots of re:publica go back not only to 2007, but actually a full hundred years, when “engineers, artists, painters and musicians first met in a Berlin machine factory in 1913, under the wary eyes of the Prussian secret police”.

Although there are a couple of details that challenge their authenticity, the posters do a remarkable job at emulating the various historic styles of graphic design. It’s obvious that the designer(s) had lots of fun with these.
The images were published under a CC-by license.

While all genres here are more or less historically accurate, this spoof is easily detectable: The Art Nouveau letterforms by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) were not made into a typeface before 1996, when Phil Grimshaw digitized them for ITC. Also, such a combination of Jugendstil and blackletter was rather unusual.

Bonus points for correctly using the two forms of ‘s’ in ‘Diskuſſion’! (However, ‘Maſchinenfabrik’ would have needed a ‘long s’, too.)

Constructivist typography similar to the works of El Lissitzky or Jan Tschichold, featuring the rarely seen P22 DeStijl Stencil. Erbar Grotesk schmalhalbfett was not available before 1929, but this still feels pretty correct.

This poster feels the least authentic to me. Yes, Helvetica was already released in 1958 (at least the regular weight). Yes, multi-color photographic reproduction was possible, theoretically. The devil is in the details: the spacing – word spaces in particular – is way too wide for a pre-digital poster design.

ITC Lubalin Graph was released in 1974, but apart from that, this is another good one. ITC Avant Garde Gothic really shines with that rainbow. Minor quibble: It looks more like a paperback cover than a poster.

I haven’t seen the acclaimed TV series Homeland so I don’t know anything about the jazz theme in the storyline, but I do know that Ty Mattson did a pretty good job emulating the look of mid-century album art for this fictional series of covers.